I'm a technology, privacy, and information security reporter and most recently the author of the book This Machine Kills Secrets, a chronicle of the history and future of information leaks, from the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks and beyond.
I've covered the hacker beat for Forbes since 2007, with frequent detours into digital miscellania like switches, servers, supercomputers, search, e-books, online censorship, robots, and China. My favorite stories are the ones where non-fiction resembles science fiction. My favorite sources usually have the word "research" in their titles.
Since I joined Forbes, this job has taken me from an autonomous car race in the California desert all the way to Beijing, where I wrote the first English-language cover story on the Chinese search billionaire Robin Li for Forbes Asia. Black hats, white hats, cyborgs, cyberspies, idiot savants and even CEOs are welcome to email me at agreenberg (at) forbes.com. My PGP public key can be found here.

James Bamford has a way of digging up the facts that lend credence to America’s worst privacy fears about its own government. Now the author and investigative reporter who wrote the definitive portraits of the National Security Agency in his books The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factoryhas drawn a picture of ubiquitous surveillance that seems mind-boggling even by NSA standards.

In his just-published cover story for Wired, Bamford lays out the NSA’s plans for a vast new facility in Bluffdale, Utah that aims to become a storage and analysis hub for the record-breakingly massive collections of Internet traffic data that the NSA hopes to gather in coming years not from just foreign networks, but domestic ones as well.

The story adds confirmation to what the New York Times revealed in 2005: that the NSA has engaged in widespread wiretapping of Americans with the consent of firms like AT&T and Verizon. But more interestingly–and more troubling in the eyes of many who value their privacy–it details the Agency’s plans to crack AES encryption, the cryptographic standard certified by the NSA itself in 2009 for military and government use and until now considered uncrackable in any amount of time relevant to mortals.

Using what will likely be the world’s fastest supercomputer and the world’s largest data storage and analysis facility, the NSA plans to comb unimaginably voluminous troves of messages for patterns they could use to crack AES and weaker encryption schemes, according to Bamford’s story. A few of the facts he’s uncovered:

The $2 billion data center being built in Utah would have four 25,000 square-foot halls filled with servers, as well as another 900,000 square feet for administration.

It will use 65 megawatts of electricity a year, with an annual bill of $40 million, and incorporates a $10 million security system.

Since 2001, the NSA has intercepted and stored between 15 and 20 trillion messages, according to the estimate of ex-NSA scientist Bill Binney. It now aims to store yottabytes of data. A yottabyte is a million billions of gigabytes. According to one storage firm’s estimate in 2009, a yottabyte would cover the entire states of Rhode Island and Delaware with data centers.

When the Department of Energy began a supercomputing project in 2004 that took the title of the world’s fastest known computer from IBM in 2009 with its “Jaguar” system, it simultaneously created a secret track for the same program focused on cracking codes. The project took place in a $41 million, 214,000 square foot building at Oak Ridge National Lab with 318 scientists and other staff. The supercomputer produced there was faster than the so-called “world’s fastest” Jaguar.

The NSA project now aims to break the “exaflop barrier” by building a supercomputer a hundred times faster than the fastest existing today, the Japanese “K Computer.” That code-breaking system is projected to use 200 megawatts of power, about as much as would power 200,000 homes.

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Can’t wait until September 2013 when this intellectual marvel will be ready. My only concern is, how this super computer will decipher constantly changing/evolving (sound -> meaning) pidgin languages that would be developed by enemy countries/groups specifically for high level military communication.

The world’s largest super computer at this moment is the decentralized network behind the crypto currency Bitcoin. It has a Network Hashrate of 144 PetaFLOPS. That is way more than the fastest 500 super computers combined. :)

But to be TOP500 rated, the system must be centralized, not distributed. Think about it this way: if they ranked distributed and/or decentralized processing systems, the top spot would always be occupied by one system, The Internet.